At the time Archbishop William Laud
was the head of the Church of England.The king sent him a decree giving him the power to visit all the
churches and buildings controlled by the church to state the condition of the
properties.When he went he found that
the Puritans had been abandoning the Church of England’s elaborate rituals, and
allowing ecclesiastical property to fall in to disuse and in some cases disrepair.
Contrary to the universal practice of the church, children in these
nonconformist towns were going through life not having participated in
confirmation.

This air of nonconformity prevailed
in these separatist towns because the lecturers who were unauthorized by the
church and as such had freedom from clerical control.With this newly gotten freedom, these
lecturers would encourage their congregations to side with the
nonconformists.Even those who were
ordained by the church were ripe for a change.When William Laud was mad the Arch Bishop of Canterbury in 1633, he
began his war on nonconformity almost immediately.

An StoneChurch from CheshireEngland

When Laud was given the power to
visit all the churches poor houses, hospitals and schools in the provinceof
Canterbury, he authorized all the Justices of the Peace to arrest all non
conformists who met in private, behind closed doors, to carry on conventicles
contrary to the law and to hale them before the Ecclesiastical Commission.

Some of the earliest efforts of the
Archbishop included compelling foreigners that still believed in their
protestant ways to conform to the Church of England.He suggested to the King and the council the
best way to rid the overwhelming sense of nonconformity found in the highly
diverse immigrant communities was to make them conform to the Anglican
ways.At first these rouge churches said
they were exempt from the authority of the Church of England, but Laud stuck
with it and finally the churches came around but not in the numbers Laud and
the Kind had originally hoped for.Laud
wanted more than just partial conformity for the good of the church.

Laud proclaimed,
he was not actuated by a desire to abolish toleration, but by a “Fear the
existence of such independent ecclesiastical units, each maintaining its own
discipline, would impair the unity of the Church of England, and might
establish what would be, in substance, a state without a state”.On his visitations, the archbishop found in
certain quarters, evidence of a fast growing Puritanism accompanied by a
general indifference, and sometimes, by an open hostility to the Church.

The symbol of the
Church of England

This desire to
unify all of England under one church, the Church of
England, was what set off the migrations ofthe Puritans.Whom the church was unable to control had
been brought before the council for censure. These lecturers would go before
the council and were given a choice between removal to the colonies or censure
of their nonconformist teachings.

It was difficult
for the church to do all of this on its own as its power had been diminishing
with the reformation and the continued defiance of the Separatists.The people whom the archbishop wanted to
impact would not

be affected by idle
threats or arguments.As a result of the
inclusion of civil law, there was an increasing desirefor the upper-class to
leave the country and seek refuge abroad. This naturally affected churches and
towns in a negative way.Towns were
depopulated; churches abandoned services and fell into a state of
disrepair.The congregations that did
remain were consolidated and forced to join other parishes.

John Winthrop
(1588-1649)

One of those people that did make the
journey to North
America, Thomas
Shepard, was banned from preaching by the Archbishop.Shepard felt unable to conform to the
church’s demands, and having felt that his liberty was threatened, and seeing
no reason for preaching in England left for New England.Many left in the previously separatist towns wrote to Governor Winthrop
in New
England
affirming their fears for the future with so many ministers and Christians
leaving for the colonies. Then a man by the name of Cotton Mather preachedto a
great many Puritans saying, “It was now also a time when some hundreds of those
good people which had the nickname of Puritans put on them, transported
themselves, with their whole families and interests into the desarts of
America, that they might here peaceably erect Congregational Churches.”

Cotton Mather
(1663-1728)

All in all, the puritans left England not as Separatists from the church,
but rather as separatists from its corruptions, “to practice the positive part
of church reformation, and propagate the gospel in America.”The persecution from which the Puritans fled was, then, one that was
inspired in their opinion, by a party in the church, whose control would soon
bring it to the state of “the house which our savior saw built upon the sand.”